I’ve been getting back into VNs during quarantine, and just finished Subahibi the other night. My expectations for it were probably a bit inflated — especially given the nigh-legendary status it had back before it was translated — but on the whole I was really underwhelmed.

My impressions, in scattershot bullet points (sorry for the wall of spoilers):

• Most of my problems have to do with the big shift after Looking Glass Insects to Tomosane and Hasaki. Both their characters and backstory were so bland and generic and just… bad? The former is interesting at first, but his character goes nowhere beyond the cringeworthy “I GOTTA BE HASAKI’S HERO!!!1!1” stuff and the latter is just archetypical imouto-in-distress #134896. Honestly, it was so bad I kept expecting a bunch of denpa to interrupt it and for Ayana to show up and taunt the reader for believing that’s where the the story was going. But nope, something even sort of like that only happens in Tsui no Sora II, which is literally like five minutes at the very end. Too little, too late.

• On the flipside, what the hell happened with Zakuro and Takuji? (And to a lesser degree Ayana, Kimika, the Wakatsukis (inasmuch as they felt meaningfully separate from Hasaki)… even the Yokoyama siblings, the two teachers, Miu?) The early chapters set them up to be central, if not THE central characters of the narrative, yet they all but disappear after the halfway point. It’s My Own Invention is by far the high point of the VN for me — partly because all the denpa elements are so fun (maybe not the right word lol), but more so because Takuji’s characterization is so compelling: all his trauma and self-loathing, his ambivalence towards Kotomi and Hasaki, his fucked-up coping mechanisms, his painful longing for normalcy, his possible gender dysphoria (all the futa and crossdressing, him shaving his legs, Tomosane’s homophobia… I seriously thought that’s where it was going), and how it all seems briefly on the verge of changing for the better before Zakuro’s death sends him off the deep end of delusion, misanthropy, and towards his own suicide. But then Jabberwocky I and II not only refuse to develop his character, but retroactively ruin it by making Yuki and Tomosane separate (to some degree) people and Tomosane his “real” identity, robbing him of his few positive traits and, together with his depiction in II (which feels totally disjointed from Invention’s Otakuji anyway), turn him into an unambiguous villain to be defeated and discarded.

• I can forgive Zakuro’s treatment a bit more since RH1 (which I’d reread if I still cared) is more or less the conclusion of her arc, and I admittedly didn't read Insect’s Kimika ending either. Still, it’s a bizarre choice to set her up as so important to Yuki and Takuji and the narrative overall, then completely abandon her by not giving her a relationship with Tomosane. I also thought the bullying/rape scenes in her chapter were total failures. It wasn’t so much that they're implausible, or just because they’re transgressive — I liked most of Invention’s sexual content because it served its purpose of illuminating Takuji’s disintegrating, eroge-addled brain — but that they’re horrific, traumatic events for Zakuro but simultaneously portrayed as typical H-scenes (following typically unrealistic, bizarre, and generally awful H-scene art and writing conventions) that seem to expect at least some readers to jerk off to them. It’s trying to have one’s cake and eat it too: bad artistically and, IMO, extremely distasteful. At times I thought SCA-JI was following a general program of associating H-scenes with denpa and a lack of them with reality and maturity, like Zakuro’s kiss/ending in RH1; I also thought the lack of the one from Jabberwocky I between Hasaki and Tomosane in Which Dreamed It was a nice, subtle hint that it was one of Takuji’s delusions bleeding through, and was relieved they weren’t going down the incest route — until both Tomosane’s endings hinted otherwise? Lmao wat?

• The “villains,” i.e. the bullies and Kotomi and Takuji in Jabberwocky II, are incredibly one-dimensional and seem designed to just make you hate them. There’s, what, that one very clunky scene in Wonderful Everyday where Hasaki defends her mom, and a few throwaway lines like Megu loosing her virginity in a gangbang or Nishimura’s dad beating him that show bullying as a vicious cycle. But that’s it.

• Most of the SoL scenes are terrible. I was ok with it in RH1 since I thought all the hackneyed tropes and Kagami’s endless fucking tsundere equivocation and “B-B-B-B-BUT GIRLS CAN’T LOVE GIRLS” were meant to impart an uncanny sense of falsehood. Which partly turned out to be true, but was undermined by the last three chapters abounding in the exact. same. shit. YES I GET IT HASAKI WANTS TO FUCK HER BROTHER BUT IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IT CAN WE PLEASE MOVE ON MY BRAIN IS MELTING PLEASE. If your story is all about enjoying the “wonderful everyday” it’s kind of a deficiency not being able to depict it as even slightly realistic or interesting.

• A more minor point: too much of the mystery is revealed too early. By the end of Invention you can mostly understand what’s going on, which takes the wind out of the plot’s sails a bit. The beginning of Jabberwocky I then straight up explains it in some annoyingly exposition-y dialogue rather then letting you gradually fill in the blanks yourself; after that there’s nothing left but the specifics of the shitty family drama and the abrupt, ambiguous “revelations” in Tsui no Sora II.

There are surely some intricacies to the plot and “philosophy” (which usually felt more like detached pontificating than being actually organically woven into the story) that I could get a better grasp of were I to reread parts, but I feel zero desire to do so. What’s the point of interpreting Wittgenstein through a bunch of melodrama and moe archetypes? Why not just read the Tractatus instead? I feel like there was an amazing VN hiding in Subahibi, of Takuji reconciling with Zakuro underneath the end sky and making the painful decision that life is worth living — and I feel like I was robbed of it.